Book Club: Some notes on the strange beauty of energy infrastructure

An extract from Richard Smyth’s The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell: Finding Wild Things With My Kids.

Hello everyone. This month’s Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything-minded book extract is taken from Richard Smyth’s The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell: Finding Wild Things With My Kids, available now and out in paperback on 28 March. One reviewer described it as “a rollicking and compulsively readable cocktail of memoir, environmental history, and tips for the nature-minded parent”. You can find out more about Richard on his website or Twitter.

This particular extract concerns the strange beauty of the infrastructure we use to produce our energy...

Coal is dead in this country, and that’s good. It’s dead but it’ll never quite be gone – we’ve put too much of ourselves into it, invested too heavily, in every sense, to let it go. There’s an interview with the great Welsh actor Richard Burton, whose father and brothers were miners, where he talks of his father’s love of the pit, of the coal seam, not respect, not any sort of grudging accommodation, love: “He used to talk about it some men will talk about women, about the beauty of this coal face.” Miners, he says, considered themselves “the aristocrats of the working class”. It doesn’t really matter whether Burton was sentimentalising or not – even if he was, he was expressing something we’ve all heard, in the street or in the pub or in miners’ strike documentaries or news clips from the Durham Miners’ Gala – something that I don’t think you can get shot of in a couple of generations just by shutting the pits. Stories persist in spite of us.

I’m not sure when I first heard of renewable energy, wind, solar, tide, but I know that when I first started thinking about it, as a kid, my knee-jerk opinion was, well, duh. You mean we can do that? We can run our fridges and streetlights and televisions on wind, literally air, and here we are fannying about with coal and oil? Come on. Oh, and I had another thought – volcanoes! Why aren’t we powering everything by volcanoes? Of course, the very good reason is that we are not Iceland and we do not have any volcanoes (the people of Shropshire would likely object to any plan to reactivate the Wrekin). But still, it all seemed so maddeningly obvious. It always has. Honestly, even now I have a better understanding of some of the challenges, some of the downsides, it still does. Why are we not throwing every penny we have at this?

One reason is we haven’t been telling the right stories.

There’s a concept in Japan, kojo moe, which I think translates literally as “factory love” but describes a 21st-century fashion for industrial nostalgia. Coach trips to derelict automobile plants, glossy photo books of decommissioned power stations, that sort of thing. Drive north over the A19 flyover at night and tell me you don’t feel it: the industrial Teesside skyline, underlit, ferrous, monumental, chemical plants, asphalt factories, engineering works, hard things to love in a lot of ways, but powerfully evocative, surely, in the same way as a shipyard or a coalmine, of great undertakings, great resolve, fierce industry, aspiration, ambition, perhaps a terrible sort of ambition, but still.

Maybe it’s just me and a coachload of Japanese hipsters who feel that way. The point is, it doesn’t have to be nostalgia – these things, these monuments to doing, building, making, working, they needn’t be old, we needn’t look to the past to see what humanity can do, when it bends its back.

The seaside has always been a place of work as well as play. I like a working seaside: the Fish Quay at North Shields, say, or, on quite a different scale, the great cranes and container ships at Felixstowe (watch them from across the bay as you share your chips with the herring gulls on the shingle beach). Then there’s power stations, at Heysham, at Torness, at Dungeness in Kent (one of the best nature reserves in the south-east sits in the shadow of the nuclear reactor at Dungeness B).

From the lighthouse on St Mary’s Island, you can look north and see the town of Blyth. Once it was known for coal and shipbuilding (HMS Ark Royal was built there); there were two coal-fired power stations and a thriving industrial port.

The port’s still there. The rest is gone: no one’s digging coal, no one’s building ships, the power stations are long since hauled down, and here, at about this point, is where the songs usually get written, and the nostalgic films get made, and the stories get told, here in this nostalgia sweet spot where things like mines and shipyards are far enough away for them to lose their sharp edges, to dissolve a little in the memory’s focus, but near enough, just about, for them still to leave an ache when they go.

But new stories are being written. Seven wind turbines turn on the long arm of Blyth Harbour. Once there were two more offshore, out in the North Sea, the first offshore turbines in the United Kingdom and one of the first in the world; they’re gone, but now there are five more, bigger and more effective, a little further out (photographers on Whitley Bay beach complain that they spoil the long shot of the lighthouse – that’s one view, but it’s not my view). Of course, these turbines are small fry nowadays – now, when there are 174 turbines at work off Hornsea and 165 more on the way, there are 190 on Dogger Bank, 87 off Walney, 91 just north of Blakeney Point (the sea areas of the Shipping Forecast, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne and so on, themselves an industrial artefact, are sometimes thought of here as a sort of national poetry, an island nation’s secular litany, but try this: Hornsea, Moray, Triton Knoll, Walney, London, Beatrice, the great windfarms of the early 21st century – because we’re going to need new poetry). From an environmental point of view – that is, the point of view where I don’t want everyone to die in fires or drown in rising seas – I think it’s marvellous, joyous, that this is happening, that these things are going up everywhere, that wind (it’s literally just air!) now provides about a quarter of the UK’s electricity. But I love it, too, for the same reason I love the Teesside skyline, the same reason the sight of pithead winding gear makes me feel a bit funny, the same reason I stopped the car once to take a photo of Torness Power Station – industry, in its basic sense, means something to us, tells its own story, and I think, where we talk about wind farms, where we talk about solar arrays, or tidal barrages, or hydropower, or any of that, any of those ways forward for us, we haven’t said that part loudly enough. The question of what we can do is an exciting one. 

Nearly 200 turbines, each 100 metres tall, 150 metres in wingspan, out there, impossibly, in the open North Sea, harvesting the trade winds, screwing energy into the earth, where before there was nothing but grey swell and sky – this is a story about doing. We almost left it too late to tell.

The Jay, The Beech And The Limpetshell is published by Icon Books. It’s available now, and out in paperback on 28 March. Here’s the blurb:

“In The Jay, The Beech And The Limpetshell, Richard Smyth explores woods, moors and seashores with his two young children, trying to see the non-human world through their eyes, and reflecting on how our relationships with animals, birds, plants and wild places shape all of our childhoods. It’s an exploration that takes in Octonauts, Charles Darwin, Calvin and Hobbes, climate change, Mary Anning, vegetarianism, rockpools, Windy Miller, unicorns, leafmould, the Gruffalo, the science of ugliness, and the origins of school sausages.” 

I should say (this is Jonn again) that Richard offered me two extracts. I chose this one because the subject matter was a more obvious fit with my readers, but the other – concerning trees, parenthood and the circle of life – was such a beautiful and transcendent piece of writing that I very nearly cried. Go buy it.

Also – if you have a book that might appeal to Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything readers, and would like to alert them to its existence, then why not hit reply and tell me about it...?